Friday, October 23, 2015

Claire Harman writes in The Independent about what Charlotte Brontë and her heroines 'can still teach us'.

You'd think 168 years would be long enough for the culture to have absorbed what an obscure Victorian girl had to say, but when I reread Brontë's novels recently, I was struck by how much in them remains totally undigested. Jane Eyre has been, in some respects, the victim of its own success: in print ever since 1847, read by millions, made into films, plays (one is showing at the National Theatre right now), sequels, prequels – it is a national treasure, as familiar and comforting as a box of chocolates. And like all classic books, people feel they know all about it without necessarily having to look at a single page. (Read more)

The Daily Mail looks at the same life - and Claire Harman's own biography - and gives us this priceless headline: 'The brutal Brontës! Emily beat up her pet dog. Charlotte - plain, toothless and dull - was so spiteful children threw stones at her'. Funny, sad or outrageous, you decide. If you want to read the rest of the sensationalistic article go ahead, but we won't be quoting from it, not even for a laugh.

The Economist reviews Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate.

The scandal that arose from the circumstances of Plath’s death and Hughes’s well-founded reputation as a promiscuous and energetic lover created a bitterness on both sides of the Atlantic that was to pursue him until the acclaimed publication of his final volume of verse, “Birthday Letters”, a few months before he died. This moving account of his seven years with Plath, an American poet who was a flawed figure with a history of mental illness, evoked sympathy and some degree of closure. The suggestion that multiple infidelities were a form of fidelity to Plath may sound like special pleading but there is no doubt that she was the great love of Hughes’s life—the Cathy of “Wuthering Heights” to the Heathcliff of his native moors—and that her ghost was with him to the end.

While Jane Eyre is often read as a romance, prompting Rochester-related swooning, Brontë consciously used features of the same gothic tradition as Shelley – think dark mansions, isolation, creepy goings on, and, most importantly, an attic. However, Bertha Mason, the ‘madwoman in the attic’, is clearly more than just a gothic trope or monster. In the last century, she has become a symbol of racial prejudice; a victim of patriarchal control; Jane’s own alter-ego; and a character in a book of her own (Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys). Just as Frankenstein’s monster is not just a monster, the madwoman is not just a mad woman. (Ellie Scorah)

[Lithuanian mezzo-soprano Justina Gringyte] said: “Every production is different. You might repeat the same role, but you have different colleagues and a different director and everyone has their own point of view, so that’s very interesting.
“I mean like Jane Eyre: we know Charlotte Brontë wrote that, but then there are so many very different movies and TV shows of Jane Eyre; different accents, different settings, different directors and so on. It would be very boring if the same production was done over and over.
“It’s also very interesting and challenging to forget what you’ve done before, forget the recordings of other productions from other people and just completely create a new picture.” (Cheryl Livingstone)

I visited the UK 21 years ago. That trip took me to a number of places, from London, Oxford to Glasgow and Edinburgh. I came into contact with the long history, unique traditions and brimming vigour of this country.
Coming back here and seeing the towering Big Ben and rippling River Thames, I feel very much at home. Episodes of history keep flashing back in my mind: the English Bourgeois Revolution, Industrial Revolution, Chartism and Normandy Landings. I recall big names such as William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Bernard Shaw, Francis Bacon, Oliver Cromwell and Winston Churchill, Thomas More, John Locke, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Arnold Toynbee and Joseph Needham. And I cannot but think of The Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre, Robinson Crusoe and Sherlock Holmes. Of course the list also includes Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and many others.

El País's El viajero (Spain) looks at the best low-cost travel offers for 2016. One of the recommended destinations is

was built in 1647 by local benefactor and landowner Sir Francis Layton, Master of the Jewel House for both Charles I and Charles II. Since then, it has been a focal point for the local community. Its east window commemorates John Wood, principally known as the employer of Charlotte Brontë. (Annette McIntyre)